Making Sense of Lesbian and Gay Identity

Abstract

Writers on identity after the postmodern turn are familiar with seeing identity described as fluid and fragmented (Elliott and du Gay, 2009: xii). This is offered up as a departure from the stasis of modernity, where identity in modernity is understood as ‘solid and stable’, and postmodern identity as shaped by a desire to ‘avoid fixation and keep the options open’ (Bauman, 1996: 18). Accounts of postmodern identity have often been concerned with deconstructing categories, and demonstrating their historically contingent nature (Fuss, 1989). This chapter aims to shift away from the repudiation of coherent, unified identities to think of how identity narratives ‘impose an order upon inchoate worlds’ (Plummer, 2001: 195). Such a deployment of narrative in social science writing, which has been called a turn ‘“back” towards a kind of humanistic modernism’ (Frosh and Baraitser, 2009: 160), allows us to think of how ‘stability and coherence are achieved’ (Plummer, 2001: 195) in a world of complexity. It is in this way that this book sees narratives as ideological. They reflect a ‘relatively formal and articulated system of meanings, values and beliefs of a kind that can be abstracted as a “world view” ’ (Williams, 1977: 109).